Data synchronization appears in many areas. For example, databases may synchronize with each other to maintain copies of information. As another example, a website may be downloaded by following all links of the website to create a complete off-line application. The new generation of tablet devices are unique in that they have both the processing power to process data stored in a local database and have been built from the ground up to support browsing the internet. As such, a new domain of application is emerging in which the application spans a combination of web pages (web content) and data visualization applications that process data stored locally on the tablet. A data visualization application may be described as an application that provides graphical representations of numeric and text data (e.g., a graph, chart, cross tabulations, etc.). When working in an application that is combined in this way, it is useful to the user to have consistent data and metadata in all presentations of the data.
Some conventional systems put all the data necessary for both views on a single device (in this case the tablet), and, in addition to using the data for the data visualization, use the data to generate the web page view. However, the web page view may be drawn from a larger set of data (too large to place on the tablet) and the size of a generalized web page generation program (such as a report output generator or a report server) may be too large for the tablet device technology.
Some conventional systems provide metadata for both the off-line web page and the off-line database. This metadata includes information, such as timestamps, that the user may use to manually enforce a refresh of data as needed.
Some conventional systems manually schedule the creation of each piece of related data on the server side, which would necessitate the manual management of the separate related data pieces on the server side by the report author or an administrator.
Some conventional systems restrict the product to one domain of information storage using only a family of web pages produced on the server and cached locally.
Some conventional systems use a combination of these strategies.